When justice becomes unjust, righteousness becomes rebellion.
— Bertolt Brecht
In the hyperrealist theater of contemporary China, where noir merges with an obsession for transparency and surveillance, what surprises is not the thirst for justice, but the survival of doubt. That a work so implicit in its critique—policemen who break the rules and pay with ostracism—has slipped through the censorship net is perhaps testimony to the Chinese paradox: it is the system itself that declares infallibility through human error. When Cheng (Zhang Yi), the embodiment of desperate loyalty, travels across the country chasing a shadow, he does so while technological power is preparing to replace intuition with algorithm. The culprit, Wang Eryong, will be tracked down by him and his tireless, unstoppable tenacity as well as by a database. It is the genetic code, alongside an obsessive moral sense, that mends the fracture.
At the heart of Endless Journey by Dai Mo moves a constellation of disillusioned figures, former agents consumed by a sense of duty and the impossibility of remaining intact within a system that first exalted and then expelled them. The law, ancient and unyielding, condemns them not for the act itself—an excessive and disproportionate use of force—but for having violated the invisible pact that governs the fiction of justice: never to act as if another’s pain were your own.
Yet, it is precisely in this rupture of the code that the essence of the film seeps in. The men of the Third Division are no longer agents of the State, but wandering fragments of a conscience that refuses oblivion. They act not to enforce the law, but to soothe the silent scream of absence—the absence of the raped girl, the lost order, the self.
It all begins in Taiping, Guangdong province. It is September 21, 2002. A 14-year-old girl, a brilliant student and fresh winner of a mathematics tournament, is found dead. Signs of forced entry, seminal fluid, absence of fingerprints, use of gloves: it is a cold, ruthless crime. The body shows evident lacerations. The Third Squad has 72 hours to solve the case. The designated suspect dies under interrogation beatings: a catastrophe that swallows the entire department.
The memory of the little victim—alone at home, pierced in fragile domestic security—is not just a case to solve: it is the sacrificial icon of the irreparable. Cheng’s wife would want to put bars on the windows, but the gesture, for him, would sound like a confession of fear: and an investigator must not fear crime, but welcome it as part of the world that gave birth to it.
The Third Division, dismantled. The policemen condemned, including Cheng, accused of voluntary injury: eight years in prison. He is released in March 2009 for good behavior, but nothing awaits him outside. The squad no longer exists. Old Zhang is dead. The others have precarious jobs, shadowy lives. Cheng has lost his family, his home, his name. But in 2016, a new crime scene—burglary, forced entry, and murder—brings the same fingerprints to light again.
Yet, precisely in that void, the father of the murdered girl, Mr. Yue, returns. He comes to thank him. His wife had already died two years earlier. That awkward gesture, that visit in silence, is a last fragment of humanity in the darkness.
It is then that the survivors meet again. Each with their story, their failures, their escapes. But the name Wang Eryong, the second culprit, remains suspended. No one vanishes into nothingness, and they know it. The criminal changes name, city, identity. But the moral urgency does not change: he must be found.
During the new investigations, other horrors emerge: hidden dens, human trafficking. But it is always the same knot that binds them all: the sense of duty as the ultimate form of love, and friendship as resistance to disintegration.
Obsessed and consumed, Cheng remains alone. His existence is the mute echo of the wound. He no longer knows whether he is chasing the culprit or himself. He is no longer certain whether he wants justice, revenge, or just to feel that something, at least something, can still be restored. Time has taken every foothold from him, yet he goes on. Because it was never only the criminal who had to be found: it was his own lost face, his own exiled soul.
In the end, what remains is a man seen from behind, unable to turn around, because the past is a living stone. Cheng has lost everything. And while the world invites him to start over, to let go, he stays there: chained to duty like an invisible cross. And the final question is not whether the culprit was caught. It is: what to do with oneself, when there is no longer a culprit to chase?
To find oneself, one must accept having been lost.
— Jorge Luis Borges
